Coppa Finished, Lomo…not quite!

The Coppa, made with chunks of pork shoulder stuffed into a casing and dried, is now done. I made two varieties, one sweet and the other spicy. The spicy one, coated with paprika, is pink in the picture below.

The water activity of each is more than low enough–the spicy is at .779aw and .814aw for the sweet. Cured sausage needs to be below about .87aw so these are well into the safe range. The sweet was fattier than the spicy and the meat is moister. The spicy is chewier, I love that, and the flavor of the paprika/cayenne spice rub is wonderful. Here’s a pic of them sliced.

The Lomo Embuchado felt firm to the touch, like its ready, so I sliced into it. Here’s a pic.

You can see the spots of not so good mold all around the outer casing. The process for drying the lomo was different from any other dried meats I’ve tried thus far. After salting the loin, the recipe called for stuffing it into the casing and hanging it in a fridge at 45 degrees and 70% humidity. I used a tiny little old fridge from home, set it to its warmest setting–about 41 degrees, and put a bowl of water in the bottom. The temperature and the humidity stayed pretty constant. Then, after a month in the cool fridge, it was moved a 60 degree fridge with 60% humidity where it hung for two weeks.

It seemed firm and dry, so I cut into it. Despite the ugly casing, the inside looked really nice.

Unfortunately the water activity is 0.922aw – a little too high still, so it’ll have to dry more before we try it.

2 Comments

I follow your blog and wish we were closer so I could try some of your samples. We are a small processor working for farmers who direct market their own livestock. We use your equipment and test every batch of jerky we produce. Mar 1 we need to include nutritioal information on all fresh ground products. This is turning into a bigger issue than we hoped given the wide range of cattle we process and differing fat content of each. My question is when are you going to develope an instrument to measure fat as easily as we measure aw? Most of the equipment out there is either very expensive, cumpersome to use or not very accurate. As we work through this issue we keep asking why someone like you hasn’t come up with something that works well accross the industry.
Thanks again for your blog.

Jay – Thanks for your comment, and for reading our blog. To be honest, we really aren’t as good at measuring fat as we are at measuring water. I think it’s a great idea, though, and will take it as a challenge to see if there are some technologies that could be applied to this problem.